“What?” Elsa says irritably.
Alf sighs again, harder.
“I said I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any bloody thing you like,” he repeats brusquely, without turning around.
Elsa pushes her hands into her pockets and glares down at the floor.
“The others at school say girls can’t be Spider-Man . . .”
Alf takes two dragging steps down the stairs. Stops. Looks at her.
“Don’t you think a lot of bastards said that to your grandmother?”
Elsa peers at him.
“Did she dress up as Spider-Man?”
“No.”
“What are you talking about, then?”
“She dressed up as a doctor.”
“Did they tell her she couldn’t be a doctor? Because she was a girl?”
Alf shifts something in the toolbox and then stuffs in the Santa suit.
“Most likely they told her a whole lot of damned things she wasn’t allowed to do, for a range of different reasons. But she damned well did them all the same. A few years after she was born they were still telling girls they couldn’t vote in the bleeding elections, but now the girls do it all the same. That’s damned well how you stand up to bastards who tell you what you can and can’t do. You bloody do those things all the bloody same.”
Elsa watches her shoes. Alf watches his toolbox. Then Elsa goes into the hall, takes two chocolate Santas, eats one of them, and throws the other to Alf, who catches it in his free hand. He shrugs slightly.
“I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any old damned thing you wanted.”
With that he shuffles off, his Italian opera music seeping out as he opens his door and closes it behind him. Elsa goes into the hall and fetches the whole bowl of chocolate Santas. Then she takes the boy’s hand and calls the wurse. All three of them go across the landing to Granny’s flat, where they crawl into the magic wardrobe that stopped growing when Granny died. It smells of wood shavings in there. And, in fact, it has magically grown to the exact dimensions needed to accommodate two children and a wurse.
The boy with a syndrome mainly keeps his eyes shut, and Elsa brings him to the Land-of-Almost-Awake. They fly over all six kingdoms, and when they turn towards Mimovas the boy recognizes where he is. He jumps off the cloud animal and starts running. When he gets to the city gates, where the music of Mimovas comes pouring out, he starts dancing. He dances beautifully. And Elsa dances with him.
27
MULLED WINE
The wurse wakes Elsa up later that night because it needs a pee. She mumbles sleepily that maybe the wurse shouldn’t have drunk so much mulled wine and tries to go back to sleep. But unfortunately the wurse begins to look sort of like wurses do when they’re planning to pee on a Gryffindor scarf, whereupon Elsa snatches the scarf away and reluctantly agrees to take it out.
When they get out of the wardrobe, Elsa’s mum and the boy with a syndrome’s mum are still up making up the beds.
“It needs a pee,” Elsa explains wearily. Mum nods reluctantly but says she has to take Alf with her.
Elsa nods. The boy with a syndrome’s mum smiles at her.
“I understand from Maud that it might have been you that left your grandmother’s letter in our mailbox yesterday.”
Elsa fixes her gaze on her socks.
“I was going to ring the bell, but I didn’t want to, you know. Disturb. Sort of thing.”
The boy’s mum smiles again.
“She wrote sorry. Your grandmother, I mean. Sorry for not being able to protect us anymore. And she wrote that I should trust you. Always. And then she asked me to try to get you to trust me.”
“Can I ask you something that could be sort of impolite?” ventures Elsa, poking at the palm of her hand.
“Absolutely.”
“How can you stand being alive and being afraid all the time? I mean, when you know there’s someone like Sam out there hunting you?”
“Darling, Elsa . . .” whispers Elsa’s mum and smiles apologetically at the boy’s mother, who just waves her hand dismissively to show that it doesn’t matter at all.
“Your grandmother used to say that sometimes we have to do things that are dangerous, because otherwise we aren’t really human.”
“She nicked that from The Brothers Lionheart,” says Elsa.
The boy’s mother turns to Elsa’s mum and looks as if she’d like to change the subject. Maybe more for Elsa’s sake than her own. “Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
Mum grins almost guiltily and shakes her head.
“We want to wait until the birth.”
“It’s going to be a she/he,” Elsa informs her. Her mum looks embarrassed.
“I didn’t want to know either until he was born,” says the boy’s mother warmly, “but then I wanted to know everything about him immediately!”
“Yes, exactly, that’s how I feel. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s healthy!”
Guilt wells up in Mum’s face as soon as the last word has escaped her lips. She glances past Elsa towards the wardrobe, where the boy lies sleeping.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” she manages to say, but the boy’s mum interrupts her at once.
“Oh, don’t say sorry. It’s fine. I know what people say. But he is healthy. He’s just a bit of extra everything, you could say.”
“I like extra everything!” Elsa exclaims happily, but then she also looks ashamed and mumbles: “Except veggie burgers. I always get rid of the tomato.”
And then both the mothers laugh so hard that the flat echoes. And that’s what they both seem to be most in need of. So even though it wasn’t her intention, Elsa decides to take the credit for that.
Alf is waiting for her and the wurse on the stairs. She doesn’t know how he knew they were coming. The darkness outside the house is so compact that if you threw a snowball you’d lose sight of it before it left your glove. They sneak under Britt-Marie’s balcony so they don’t give the wurse away. The wurse backs into a bush and looks as though it would have appreciated having a newspaper or something.
Elsa and Alf turn away respectfully. Elsa clears her throat.
“Thanks for helping me with Renault.”
Alf grunts. Elsa shoves her hands in her jacket pockets.
“Kent’s an asswipe. Someone should poison him!”
Alf’s head turns slowly.
“Don’t say that.”
“What?”
“Don’t bloody talk like that.”
“What? He is an asswipe, isn’t he?”
“Maybe so. But you don’t damn well call him that in front of me!”
“You call him a bloody idiot, like, all the time!”
“Yes. I’m allowed to. You’re not.”
“Why not?”
Alf’s leather jacket creaks.
“Because I’m allowed to get shitty about my little brother. You’re not.”
It takes many different kinds of eternities for Elsa to digest that piece of information.
“I didn’t know that,” she manages to say at last. “Why are you so horrible to each other if you’re brothers?”
“You don’t get to choose your siblings,” mutters Alf.
Elsa doesn’t really know how to answer that. She thinks about Halfie. She’d rather not, so she changes the subject:
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Never you bloody mind.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“I’m a damned grown-up. It’s bloody obvious I’ve been in love. Everyone’s been in bloody love sometime.”
“How old were you?”
“The first time?”
“Yes.”
“Ten.”
“And the second time?”
Alf’s leather jacket creaks. He checks his watch and starts heading back to the house.
“There was no second time.”
Elsa is about to a
sk something else. But that’s when they hear it. Or rather, it’s the wurse that hears it. The scream. The wurse leaps out of the bush and hurtles into the darkness like a black spear. Then Elsa hears its bark for the first time. She thought she’d heard it barking before, but she was wrong. All she’s heard before are yelps and whines compared to this. This bark makes the foundations of the house quake. It’s a battle cry.
Elsa gets there first. She’s better at running than Alf.
Britt-Marie is standing, white-faced, a few yards from the door. There’s a carrier bag of food dropped on the snow. Lollipops and comic books have spilled out of it. A stone’s throw away stands Sam.
With a knife in his hand.
The wurse stands resolutely between them, its front paws planted like concrete pillars in the snow, its teeth bared. Sam isn’t moving, but Elsa can see that he’s hesitating. He slowly turns around and sees her, and his gaze pulverizes her spine. Her knees want to give way and let her sink into the snow and disappear. The knife glitters in the glow of the streetlights. Sam’s hand hovers in the air, his body rigid with animosity. His eyes eat their way into her, cold and warlike. But the knife isn’t directed at her, she can see that.
Elsa can hear Britt-Marie sobbing. She doesn’t know where the instinct comes from, or the courage, or maybe it’s just pure stupidity—Granny always used to say that she and Elsa were the sort of people who, deep down, were a bit soft in the head, and it would get them in trouble sooner or later—but Elsa runs. Runs right at Sam. She can see him bring the knife down confidently by a few inches, and that the other hand is raised like a claw to catch her as she leaps.
But she doesn’t have time to get there. She collides with something dry and black. Feels the smell of dry leather. Hears the creaking of Alf’s jacket.
And then Alf is standing in front of Sam, with the same ominous body language. Elsa sees the hammer sliding into his palm from the coat-arm. Alf swings it calmly from side to side. Sam’s knife doesn’t move. They do not take their eyes off each other.
Elsa doesn’t know how long they stand there. For how many eternities of fairy tales. It feels like all of them. It feels as if she has time to die. As if the terror is cracking her heart.
“The police are on their way,” Alf finally utters in a low voice. He sounds as if he thinks it’s a pity. That they can’t just finish this here and now.
Sam’s eyes wander calmly from Alf to the wurse. The wurse’s hackles are raised. It growls like rolling thunder from its lungs. A faint smile steals across Sam’s lips for an unbearable length of time. Then he takes a single step back and the darkness engulfs him.
The police car skids into the street, but Sam is long gone by then. Elsa collapses into the snow as if her clothes have been emptied of whatever was in there. She feels Alf catching her and hears him hissing at the wurse to run up the stairs before the police catch sight of it. She hears Britt-Marie panting and the police crunching through the snow. But her consciousness is already fading, far away. She’s ashamed of it, ashamed of being so afraid that she just closes her eyes and escapes into her mind. No knight of Miamas was ever so paralyzed with fear. A real knight would have stayed in position, straight-backed, not taken refuge in sleep. But she can’t help it. It’s too much reality for an almost-eight-year-old.
She wakes up on the bed in Granny’s bedroom. It’s warm. She feels the wurse’s nose against her shoulder and pats its head.
“You’re so brave,” she whispers.
The wurse looks as if maybe it deserves a cookie. Elsa slips out of the sweaty sheets, onto the floor. Through the doorway she sees Mum standing in the front hall, her face gray. She’s shouting furiously at Alf, so angry she’s crying. Alf stands there in silence, taking it. Elsa runs through into Mum’s arms.
“It wasn’t their fault, they were only trying to protect me!” Elsa sobs.
Britt-Marie’s voice interrupts her.
“No, it was obviously my fault! My fault, it was. Everything was obviously my fault, Ulrika.”
Elsa turns to Britt-Marie, realizing as she does so that Maud and Lennart and the boy with a syndrome’s mum are also in the hall. Everyone looks at Britt-Marie. She clasps her hands together over her stomach.
“He was standing outside the door, hiding, but I caught the smell of those cigarettes, I did. So I told him that in this leaseholders’ association we don’t smoke! And then he got out that . . .”
Britt-Marie can’t bring herself to say “knife” without her voice breaking again. She looks offended, as you do when you’re the last to learn a secret.
“You all know who he is, of course! But obviously none of you thought to warn me about it, oh no. Even though I’m the information officer in this residents’ association!”
She straightens out a wrinkle in her skirt. A real wrinkle, this time. The bag of lollipops and comics is by her feet. Maud tries to put a tender hand on Britt-Marie’s arm, but Britt-Marie removes it. Maud smiles wistfully.
“Where is Kent?” she asks softly.
“He’s at a business meeting!” Britt-Marie snaps.
Alf looks at her, then at the bag from the supermarket, and then at her again.
“What were you doing out so late?” Mum says.
“Kent’s children get lollipops and comics when they come for Christmas! Always! I was at the shop!”
“Sorry, Britt-Marie. We just didn’t know what to say. Look, why don’t you just stay here tonight, at least? It may be safer if we’re all together?”
Britt-Marie surveys them over the tip of her nose.
“I’m sleeping at home. Kent is coming home tonight. I’m always home when Kent arrives.”
The policewoman with the green eyes comes up the stairs behind her. Britt-Marie spins around. The green eyes stay on her, watchfully.
“It’s about time you turned up!” Britt-Marie says. The green-eyed officer doesn’t say anything. Another officer is standing behind her, and Elsa can see that he’s flummoxed by just having caught sight of Elsa and Mum. He seems to remember escorting them to the hospital only to be given the slip once they got there.
Lennart tries to invite them both in for coffee, and the summer-intern policeman looks like this would be preferable to searching the area with dogs, but after a stern glance from his superior he shakes his head at the floor. The green-eyed policewoman talks with the sort of voice that effortlessly fills a room.
“We’re going to find him,” she says, her gaze still riveted to Britt-Marie. “Also, the dog that Kent called about yesterday, Britt-Marie? He said you’d found dog hairs on the stairs. Did you see it tonight?”
Elsa stops breathing. So much that she forgets to wonder about why Green-eyes is referring to Kent and Britt-Marie by their first names. Britt-Marie peers around the room, at Elsa and Mum and Maud and Lennart and the boy with a syndrome’s mum. Last of all at Alf. His face is devoid of expression. The green eyes sweep over the front hall. There’s sweat all over Elsa’s palms when she opens and closes her hands to make them stop shaking. She knows that the wurse is sleeping just a few yards behind her, in Granny’s bedroom. She knows that everything is lost, and she doesn’t know what to do to stop it. She’ll never be able to escape with the wurse through all the police she can hear at the bottom of the stairs, not even a wurse could pull that off. They’ll shoot it. Kill it. She wonders if that was what the shadow had been planning all along. Because it didn’t dare fight the wurse. Without the wurse, and without Wolfheart, the castle is defenseless.
Britt-Marie purses her lips when she sees Elsa staring at her. Changes her hands around on her stomach and snorts, with a sudden, newly acquired self-confidence, at Green-eyes.
“Maybe we misjudged it, Kent and I. Maybe they weren’t dog hairs, it may have been some other nuisance. It wouldn’t be so strange, with so many odd people running about on these stairs these days,” she says, half-apologetically and half-accusingly, and adjusts the brooch on the floral-print jacket.
The green
eyes glance quickly at Elsa. Then the policewoman nods briskly, as if the matter is over and done with, and assures them they’ll keep the house under surveillance for the night. Before anyone has time to say anything else, the two officers are already on their way down the stairs. Elsa’s mum is breathing heavily. She holds out her hand to Britt-Marie, but Britt-Marie moves away.
“Obviously you find it amusing to have secrets from me. It’s amusing to make me look like an idiot, that’s what you think!”
“Please, Britt-Marie,” Maud tries to say, but Britt-Marie shakes her head, picks up her bag, and stamps out the door. Well-meaningly.
But Elsa sees the way Alf looks at her when she leaves. The wurse is standing in the bedroom doorway with the same expression. And now Elsa knows who Britt-Marie is.
Mum also goes down the stairs, Elsa doesn’t know why. Lennart puts on some coffee. George gets out some eggs and makes more mulled wine. Maud distributes cookies. The boy with a syndrome’s mother crawls into the wardrobe to find her son, and Elsa hears him laughing. That’s one good superpower he’s got there.
Alf goes onto the balcony and Elsa goes after him. Stands hesitantly behind him for a long time before joining him and peering over the railing. Green-eyes is standing in the snow, talking to Elsa’s mum. She smiles the way she smiled at Granny that time in the police station.
“Do they know each other?” Elsa asks, surprised. Alf nods.
“Knew, at least. They were best friends when they were your age.”
Elsa looks at Mum, and she can see that she’s still angry. Then she peers at the hammer that Alf has set down in a corner of the balcony floor.
“Were you going to kill Sam?”
Alf’s eyes are apologetic but honest.
“No.”
“Why was Mum so angry at you, then?”
Alf’s leather jacket heaves slightly.
“She was angry because she wasn’t there holding the hammer.”
Elsa’s shoulders sink; she wraps her arms around herself against the cold. Alf hangs his leather jacket over her. Elsa hunches up inside it.
“Sometimes I think I’d like someone to kill Sam.”